Slate is running a series of articles this week adapted from Peter McGraw and Joel Warner’s forthcoming study The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. (The book is scheduled for release on April 1, of course.) The first entry in the series posits a new unified theory of comedy (beyond the traditional theories of superiority, incongruity, and relief): the benign violation theory, “the idea that humor arises when something seems wrong or threatening, but is simultaneously OK or safe.”
I like this theory, and I think it helps to explain the success of a writer like Jack Handey, whose work has been on my mind lately. You probably know Handey as the author of “Deep Thoughts”—though, as every article about Handey is required to mention, you may have assumed that Handey was a made-up name, a bit of Saturday Night Live legerdemain. He’s quite real (he lives in New Mexico, with his wife and cats), and last year he published his first novel, The Stench of Honolulu. I’ll get to the novel in a moment. But first let’s read a few Deep Thoughts, and see how the benign violation theory holds up.
Consider the daffodil. And while you’re doing that, I’ll be over here, looking through your stuff.
To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.
Each example ends with a violation (of Commandments Eight and Six, respectively), but the general atmosphere is benign: no stuff was stolen, no fathers were murdered. (In this way, the jokes follow Aristotle’s definition of the comic: the ludicrous is foregrounded; there’s no real pain.) If you turn to the New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” each week, or if you grew up with Woody Allen’s Without Feathers and Steve Martin’s Cruel Shoes, you’re familiar with this type of comedy. (Handey and Martin were next-door neighbors and friends in the early ’70s in Santa Fe, before either had become famous.) That violating arrow through Martin’s brainpan? It’s OK, it’s safe.
About a year ago, in the New York Post, George Saunders called Handey “the funniest writer in America.” Ian Frazier, in his introduction to Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing, gushes that Handey’s “What I’d Say to the Martians” is “the funniest piece of the last ten years.” The accolades go on and on. A 2013 New York Times Magazine profile was titled “Jack Handey Is the Envy of Every Comedy Writer in America.”
About The Stench of Honolulu: It’s not that great. I mean, it’s often very funny—and if, say, a student turned it in, you’d give that student an “A,” but you’d also roll your eyes at the font size (it’s gigantic) and the apparent disinterest in plot. The novel, clearly, isn’t Handey’s form; he’s a quick-strike joke-artist, a single-target absurdist. I’m tempted to say he’s built for the age of Tweets, but Twitter mostly tackles the present, the trending moment, whereas Handey operates outside of the present: in a world of cavemen, and Martians, and car-driving cats. It keeps him from ever seeming, at his best, out of step; he’s walking in an entirely different direction than the rest of us. A handy trick, that.
